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Boulder prides itself on being welcoming to all. But its citizens of color tell a different story

Civil rights complaints in Boulder County up sharply since 2012, rising faster than state as a whole

By Shay Castle

Staff Writer

Posted:
07/28/2018 05:50:00 PM MDT

Updated:
08/01/2018 06:41:24 PM MDT

Ja'mal Gilmore, owner of The Brooklyn Barber Academy, talks to Jay Ferracone during his haircut at the Boulder barber shop on Monday. Gilmore says being a black businessman in Boulder means waking a fine line, being black enough to avoid accusations of whitewashing from black customers, "but not be too black that white people are afraid of me." (Cliff Grassmick / Staff Photographer)

The Inclusion Illusion

A three-part series looking at the experience of people of color in Boulder and efforts to make the city more inclusive

Part 1: Boulder prides itself on being welcoming to all. But its citizens of color tell a different story

EDITOR'S NOTE: This article has been updated to accurately reflect Fred Davis's college and major.

Kemba Douglas has been, for as long as she can remember, the token black girl in predominantly white spaces.

Born in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., she lived in a mostly white neighborhood. She went to mostly white schools. She shopped and worked in mostly white stores, with mostly white customers and co-workers.

A move to Georgia with her family didn't change much. She was still often the only black person around. It wasn't hard, she said — it was just life.

But some parts of it were harder than others. She hated the stares she would get, the malevolent looks. She hated when people would ignore her after she gave a friendly hello; even worse when they threw rude comments her way. She never knew if it was because she was black, but she always suspected. Sometimes they eased her doubt, using racial epithets. Then she knew.

She was excited to move to Colorado last year, a state she felt was on the bluer end of the political spectrum. And the city she was headed for was the bluest of the blue, having turned out three times as many votes for Hilary Clinton as for Donald Trump: Boulder, home to the Buddhist-inspired Naropa University, where she would be pursuing a master's degree.

Kemba Douglas stands outside The Lazy Dog Sports Bar & Grill on Boulder's Pearl Street Mall on July 9. Douglas filed a discrimination complaint with Colorado's Civil Rights Division after she says a hostess at the Lazy Dog sat her in the back of the restaurant, following a prolonged wait, and ignored a request for better seating, despite many open tables. Steve Ross, the Lazy Dog's owner, characterized the incident as a misunderstanding. (Paul Aiken / Staff Photographer)

But little pieces of home followed her here. Once again, she often was the sole minority wherever she went, in a town with a crushingly white majority population (Boulder is 88 percent white, according to the U.S. Census Bureau). The stares, the comments, the questions, the disbelief at why she had come, all persisted, puncturing her vision of a liberal utopia.

Customers at the Pearl Street shop she worked at refused to respond to her friendly greetings, only to turn around and chat animatedly with her white colleagues. Managers at her neighborhood grocery store followed her around, failing to recognize her despite repeated appearances. Restaurant workers used rude tones and shot dirty looks.

Fred Davis, owner and head of business operations for Clear Choice Window Tinting & Clearbras, checks out one of his client's cars in his company's facility in Boulder on July 19. Despite Boulder's image of tolerance and inclusion, Davis says, "It's not kumbaya. Not for us." (Paul Aiken / Staff Photographer)

As always, she saw the slights as chances for personal growth. Keep being kind, she reminded herself. But it was harder, here in Boulder, harder to overcome what she had been facing her whole life.

Why here, she asked herself, in this city that prides itself on progressiveness, did she feel so uncomfortable? Why now, in 2018 — after decades of struggle for civil rights and equal opportunity and fair treatment at the hands of police and politicians on a national level — did she still have to deal with so much ignorance and hostility?

Civil rights complaints in Boulder County are up sharply over the last few years, rising faster than those in neighboring counties and Colorado as a whole. Businesses and organizations say it is difficult to hire and keep non-white workers; shoppers of color say they avoid the city's stores.

Nami Thompson, left, speaks to Matt Jeffrey, executive director of Project Local Community, and Sara Brown, the organization's director and treasurer, in Lafayette on June 25. Thompson, an Indian-American, started the group Boulder Parenting in Diversity to navigate the complexities of raising biracial children in a majority-white community. (Matthew Jonas / Staff Photographer)

Efforts to jump-start inclusiveness, though broad, have had limited success. Boulder's first diversity officer — hired explicitly to "make Boulder a more diverse and welcoming workplace and community" — left the job under unexplained circumstances after less than a year, and now the city has outsourced its diversity work to a national organization.

Racism is not exclusive to the so-called People's Republic. It is a hallmark of America, as much as apple pie and blue jeans. But it is particularly pernicious here, people of color say, in a town that paints itself proudly with the loving, liberal colors of tolerance while resisting true change.

"We don't believe in racism," said Carolyn Brinkworth, chief diversity, equity and inclusion officer at Boulder's University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. "We believe in equity. But that's not the day-to-day reality."

'We've been living this'

It starts when they are young. The segregation. Black, white, Latino children. They begin to split themselves into groups, largely based on skin color. Some selection may be self-directed; research has shown that by the age of 3 or 4, kids begin to exhibit racial preference.

It is reinforced over the years, in ways subtle and overt. By teachers instructing inferiority through lessons that suggest Native American and black history started with slavery and submission, erasing thousands of years of culture and pride. By parents, intent on sending their children to the "best" schools, the ones with fewer of those kids — often a thinly veiled reference to Latinos.

Sometimes it breaks out into the open, as with the discovery in 2016 that students at high schools in Boulder, Lafayette and Louisville were participating in a Nazi-themed group chat on Facebook that advocated killing African-Americans and Jews.

"We were called 'nigger' weekly at Boulder High in the '80s," said Fred Davis, a small business owner and longtime local. "It's probably still happening now."

Nearly every person of color interviewed by the Daily Camera — black or not — had endured that racial slur at some point.

Matthew Jansen, owner of Mateo restaurant in Boulder and Raglan Market in Gunbarrel, said he and his wife hear it from the stands at their children's soccer games, directed at the young players. Nami Thompson, an Indian-American, said she heard it at a local grocery store when she reached across a white person to grab something off a shelf. Her daughter, 3, was there.

Incidents like these motivated Thompson to start Boulder Parenting in Diversity to navigate the complexities of raising biracial children in a majority-white community. There was much discussion in the group during the last presidential election; its members were convinced a victory by Donald Trump was imminent, despite the insistence of many Boulderites that such a thing was impossible.

"Nobody was listening to us," Thompson said. "And then he did (win) and people were surprised. And we were like, 'Why? We've been living this.'"

Discrimination complaints on upswing

There is no data specifically about casual racism in Boulder; no easily Google-able statistic about how often, over a lifetime, a person of color will experience words or actions that don't rise to level of violence or crimes.

There are only stories. Dozens of them. Every non-white person has their own seemingly endless list of incidents that, combined, created a distinct narrative: you do not belong.

The little data available does not paint a flattering picture of Boulder County. The Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies' Civil Rights Division fields complaints based on perceived discrimination in the workplace, housing or public accommodations such as buses or restaurants.

Douglas filed one earlier this year after a hostess at Boulder's Lazy Dog Sports Bar & Grill sat her in the back of the restaurant, following a prolonged wait, and ignored a request for better seating, despite many open tables. She was inclined to shake the incident off, but her white boyfriend, also present at the time, was outraged by the treatment, which both felt was racially motivated.

Lazy Dog's owner, Steve Ross, characterized the incident as a misunderstanding, pointing out that the restaurant has had no other complaints in 21 years. The state Civil Rights Division does not comment on open complaints; though the incident occurred in March, no resolution has yet been reached.

Boulder County saw a 112 percent increase in recorded discrimination complaints between 2012 and 2017, according to the state Civil Rights Division. That was larger growth than the state as a whole (66 percent) and the county's closest comparable neighbors, Larimer (46 percent) and Weld (37 percent) counties.

Complaints are not broken down at the county level by city of occurrence or motivation (age, race, gender, etc.). But state-level data shows race is making up an increasing number of the reported grievances, from 19 percent in 2012 to 26 percent last year.

Complaints tend to track with the population: larger counties have more, and they tend to rise as the population grows. But Boulder County stands somewhat alone, with more complaints than neighboring and similar-sized counties, and steeper increases than any of the largest counties and Colorado as a whole.

"I feel the difference," said Douglas, who works a second job in Denver. That city feels friendlier to minorities, she said. Many people contacted for this article said the racial tensions they experience are more limited to Boulder; they feel more welcome in Louisville, Lafayette or Longmont.

Several UCAR interns of color have expressed feeling "uneasy" in Boulder, Brinkworth said. Most minority full-time employees live elsewhere in the Denver metro area, in cities less white and wealthy, Brinkworth said, and the agency has lost job candidates who wanted to live somewhere with more people of color.

It is not only malevolent encounters that create a feeling of otherness. As an ethnic minority, there can be a sense of always being in the spotlight. Well-meaning comments are often just as wearing, said Davis, who, though in his 50s, still gets asked what sport he plays, just as he did when he was a communications major at Colorado State University.

When your every move feels monitored, said Ja'mal Gilmore, every simple human act becomes a performance. Gilmore, who owns The Brooklyn Barber Academy in Boulder, said he must stay calm in all circumstances, lest he be labeled aggressive, a common stereotype of black men.

Perpetual existence under a white gaze can turn expressions of black culture into indulgences, to be engaged in only under certain conditions. During an interview, a white man on a motorcycle rode by several times, blasting hip-hop. It look Gilmore a long time to feel comfortable playing hip-hop music in his own shop, he said; Davis said he's still loathe to listen to his preferred '90s rap at work, though he lets his employees tune in to whatever they want.

Both men talked of code-switching, altering how they speak depending on who's around, as necessary to survival as business owners catering to a mostly white customer base.

It is fine line to be walked, said Gilmore, being black enough to avoid accusations of whitewashing from black customers, "but not be too black that white people are afraid of me. It's exhausting."

'It's not kumbaya. Not for us.'

If Douglas had known how it would feel to be black in Boulder, she might never have come. Already, she has moved away, to Broomfield, though she is committed to staying at Naropa to finish her education. But there was no brochure, no fine print on the visitor's bureau website warning of what she might face. All the evidence pointed to a community that "takes pride in being open-minded (and) conscious."

But hate is still happening, she said, "every single day."

"It's not kumbaya," Davis said. "Not for us."

Gilmore once felt that acceptance was just out of reach, and if only he accomplished one more thing, he would be embraced.

"It used to be if you went to college, if you did some service, if you just volunteered," he said. "Maybe you need to stop thinking like a renter and own your own place. Then it became you need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps."

But he has done all those things. He went to New York University at 15. He joined the Navy and served during times of war. He has given time and money to youth sports, to area nonprofit organizations; he bought his own home and, after 17 years of saving, started his own business. Still, nothing has changed.

"There's no more boxes for me to check," he said. "No one treats me any differently than when I was 18."

Acceptance looks different to Douglas. She yearns to move through Boulder freely, to exist without her existence being a topic of conversations, to shop and work on Pearl Street and not draw stares or comments. They are simple wishes that show just what is being denied to her.

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